


Crucible

by venndaai



Series: circle of jedi [2]
Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Backstory, Fantastic Racism, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 09:22:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5661190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daja and the Force, through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crucible

 

 

* * *

 

 

1.

 

She was on Third Ship Kisubo, or rather, what was left of it after the explosion. She was alive for the moment, wearing her child-sized enviro suit, wedged between two crumpled bulkheads, listening to the hiss of her leaking oxygen tank, staring at the face of the dead navigator. Her cousin Gani. The other bodies had drifted away after the first day, but some trick of vacuum gravity had kept him pressed against the ruin of their ship. Daja didn't want to look at his frozen corpse, at the jagged hole in his suit's helmet, but she couldn't turn her head. She wanted to free him, push his body away from the ship, give him a proper Trader space burial, but she was wedged too tightly to move a muscle. Instead she looked over Gani's shoulder, where a hole in the wreckage revealed a wheeling patch of stars. She wanted to believe the rotation was slowing, but there was nothing to slow them in the void. She and Gani would continue tumbling through space until someone picked up the ship's mass as a speck on a radar screen or they left the light of the galaxy behind and were swallowed by the demons beyond.

She told herself that she'd known this could happen. Trader ships were like smuggler's swoops; they didn't carry automatic emergency beacons.  The reasoning being that if no one survived to activate the beacon, there was no use leading the kaq scavengers to the corpses. And if someone, some lone girl did survive... then she was not a Trader anyway.

Daja didn't try to hold back the tears. They rolled down her cheeks and were sucked into the suit's recycling system. She could see the readout, at the far edge of her vision. Six more hours of air. Two days' supply of water, not that it would do her any good. Heat at least wasn't a problem. Kisubo vacuum suits were well made, with insulation and solar converters that would keep her warm for a hundred years.

She didn't want to die. Not out here. Not now.

The elders said that some of the shamans could use the Force to control their breath. There were stories of great heroes who escaped capture by feigning death, breathing only once a minute. Could she do that? Stupid- of course she couldn't, she was no shaman or hero. But at least it would give her something to focus on, something besides Gani's burst eyes and that endlessly spinning star field.

She tried breathing deep and slow, counting between each inhale. It wasn't working right. She needed a focus. She needed that damn hissing to stop. She knew exactly what the oxygen tank looked like. Refilling them and checking for cracks had been her job. She could easily visualize this one, could imagine the location of the leak. Daja screwed her eyes tight. Close, she begged the plasticeel. It's such a small hole. If a scrap of paint flaked off it would be sucked over the hole, plugging the leak. Please. Please.

The hissing stopped. Daja blinked, saw Gani and closed her eyes again. Thank you, Koma, she thought.

Now, she had to become stone. Daja counted between her breaths. Her muscles relaxed. Her mind emptied. Beyond the static silence of her suit, she heard something like music.

 

* * *

 

2.

  
Before Frostpine, there had been trouble.

It started in the creche. Daja was put with children half her age, who stared at her, though at least they were too young to know any of the slurs humans used for Traders. The teachers there took away her trangshi staff with its hateful blank cap. They took her red mourning tunic and dressed her in Jedi whites and beiges. She put up with it, because she had no choice. She even held still while they chopped off almost all her braids, leaving only one to stick out alone and ugly behind her ear. Nico had carefully explained to her that she didn't have to be a Jedi if she didn't want to. Daja listened and nodded and knew that she didn't actually have a real choice at all. Any organizations willing to foster a trangshi Trader child would tell her that her parents had abused her by raising her in their culture. And the only other option was civil service in the Agricorps. Daja didn't know what kind of life she wanted, but she thought that being a Jedi would be better than being a farmer.

So she let the white-robed masters turn her into one of their drones, but then some well-meaning minder tried to tell her gently that padawans did not pray to dead ancestors or beings beyond the Force.

Daja was kneeling in a courtyard, in front of a makeshift altar. She got to her feet, slowly.

“I believe in the Force,” Daja said steadily. She moved one foot to balance better, folded her arms, tried to forge herself into metal and rock and all things immovable. “But I believe in my gods too.”

“You can't believe in both,” the minder said, exasperated. She had burnished gold skin and long lekku covered in brown stripes. She looked too young to be a Knight, and there was a beaded string hanging next to her left lekku. It would have been easier to resent her if she were human, Daja thought. “They're mutually exclusive.”

Daja breathed deep. She wanted a staff. Even the awful blank one would be welcome now. She could tap it on the floor, to ground herself. “My people have been managing it for millennia,” she said evenly.

The woman rolled her dark green eyes. “The Jedi are your people now,” she said. “And you'll just have to get used to it, if you want to be apprenticed and not sent to the Corps. Though how you'll learn enough in just three years I can't imagine. This is why there are rules about age.”

I know, Daja wanted to say. Her face was heating up and her eyes were stinging. I know no one wants me. You don't have to rub it in.

“Padawan Laude?” someone said from the courtyard entrance. Someone small and high-pitched and very, very confident. “Didn't you know that Master Nico brought her to the Temple himself? Are you questioning his judgment? Perhaps we should call him. I'm sure he would be thrilled to hear your input.”

Daja looked up as Laude turned. She saw a short human girl of around Daja's age, wearing a more elaborate version of Daja's robes, bright blue eyes and sandy skin just visible beneath a light veil. She was standing and glaring like someone about three times taller, and her button nose was lifted in aristocratic disdain.

“Oh,” Laude said. “Lady Sandrilene.” The honorific was spoken with both sarcasm and reluctant respect. “How kind of you to join us. Shouldn't you be at meditation?”

The girl sniffed. “Master Staghorn agreed that I should seek balance in the gardens.”

“Oh, I'll bet he did.”

Now Daja was curious. What had this prim little human girl with her upper class Core accent done to deserve the vitriol in the older woman's voice?

“It occurs to me,” Sandrilene said, “that you ought to be keeping an eye on your younger wards, Padawan. It would be dreadful if one were to injure themselves because you had...” She let her eyes drift over the tableau, disapproving. “...better things to be doing than looking out for them.”

If looks could kill, Sandrilene would be a smoking crater at this point. “Daja is my responsibility also,” Laude said.

The small girl stepped forward and before Daja knew what was happening there was a thin arm wrapped around her elbow, wisps of gray-brown hair tickling her face. “Lady Daja is my friend,” Sandrilene said. “And a friend of Master Nico's. You are in charge of the younglings, because your master did not think you suited to a more... active role. I suggest you attend to your duties.”

Daja shivered at the force in that imperious voice. She stood very still.

Laude stared at Sandrilene for a moment, eyes hot with anger. _“Sahak chir, eyan tualin obyru,”_ she declared, and stalked out of the garden. Daja twisted her braid around her finger. So even Laude hadn't entirely given up her roots. Her mother had always told her that kaqs were hypocrites.

“You shouldn't have done that,” Daja remarked in Tradertalk.

“But I wanted to,” the human girl replied in the same language, and Daja twisted her head to peer at her incredulously. Her accent wasn't even half bad, just a bit odd.

“We don't always get what we want,” Daja managed after a moment.

“Oh, I know,” Sandrilene said. Her eyes were merry with laughter. “That's why I take everything that I can.”

“How very human of you.”

Sandrilene frowned. “Whoops,” she said. “Was I being rude again? I'm sorry.” She held out a tiny hand. “I'm Sandry,” she said.

Daja's fingers looked large and brown next to Sandry's. She reached out, and their fingertips touched.

She felt something. A tug of gravity, a faint strain of music that was not music. A whisper in the force.

 

* * *

 

 

3.

  
It was only a few hours after that that Nico came for Daja for a second time. Daja felt a tug to find Sandry, to make some sort of farewell, but there was no time, and she didn't know where the other girl lived when she wasn't making enemies of the youngling minders.

Nico was as odd as she remembered, but seeing him made her feel safe. He had helped her before. He was good, for a kaq.

“Hello again, Daja,” he said, the familiar small smile twisting the corners of his long thin mouth. “I've been told you've been having some difficulty adjusting.”

She smiled back in spite of herself. “I'm sorry if I've caused you trouble,” she said.

He waved a long and elegant hand. “It's unimportant. I only hope that I can help you find an environment more accommodating.”

'More accommodating' turned out to mean a suite of rooms by the temple gardens. 'More accommodating' meant no more dormitories. No more minders. It meant two Jedi Knights, a scowling, small human woman and a Togruta woman who swept Daja into a warm, enveloping hug. 'More accommodating' meant Briar Moss.

He was shorter than her, and skinny, but he had an edge to him that she hadn't seen since she'd arrived at the Temple. He might have been human, but he was just as out of place on Coruscant as she was. It didn't endear him to her, but it did make him seem almost more real than the other Temple inhabitants.

“Hey, Trader,” he said, and poked her.

There was no song, not with Briar, not then. Not for many weeks more. She was never much good at foresight. The Force didn't tell her, _these are the people who are important. These are the ones you're stuck with._

Not until the tunnels, the disaster, the cave-in. Not until the circle.

 

* * *

 

 

4.

 

Lark and Rosethorn changed things- gave her a home, and friends (siblings, her heart murmured rebelliously), a room of her own where she could light incense for Third Ship Kisubo. Then she wandered into Frostpine's lab, and things changed more than she could ever have imagined.

Telemetrics, Master Nico said. Frostpine just said, “Everything talks, girl. You just have to be patient enough to listen.”

Daja understood patience.

"Traders use the Force, don't they?" Frostpine asked her.

She nodded, then shook her head. "Not like this," she said. "Not with- things. The Force is guiding ships through the air, or seeing visions of the future in fire. I never did any of that."

Frostpine just nodded. "It works in different ways through all of us," he said, and he held out a helmet with a completely opaque black visor. "Mind wearing this for a minute?"

"Sure," Daja said warily. He pushed it gently down over her cropped hair. The word disappeared into blackness. 

"Take this," Frostpine's voice said outside the helmet, and then there was something small in her hands.

"It's a crystal?" she said, somewhat confused. "It's-" She paused, and focused on what the object was telling her. "It's like the crystal in your lightsaber, isn't it- but it's pink? I've never seen a pink lightsaber."

Frostpine chuckled. "They're not popular, but they're used in training sabers sometimes."

"Because they're not as hot," she said, excited to know the answer to the question he hadn't yet asked.

"Right." There was a moment of disorientation as the helmet was pulled off her head, and then she was looking into Frostpine's friendly face. "Daja," he said, "I've been waiting a long time to meet someone like you."

She swallowed, and blinked at him.

"I'd like to ask you to be my apprentice," he said. 

Her hands squeezed the crystal. "You could teach me?" she whispered. "How to make things? I could do that? I'd be useful?"

"You'd be more than useful." He smiled at her. "I think you could be invaluable to all of us, Daja. You could do great things."

She swayed a little. For the first time in her life, someone was giving her a choice over her own path. She looked down at the crystal, which was glowing softly in her hands, and realized she wanted to choose to be alive, and happy.

 

* * *

 

 5.

 

"That's awful, Daja," Sandry said, two months later, when Daja finally told her about the wreck. Her cornflower eyes were round as portholes. "That's worse than... than a storeroom." Her tongue tripped over the last few words, and Daja didn't think that was due to her clumsiness in Tradertalk.

Daja shook her head. "No way," she said. "I was only there for a week. Less. To be trapped for over a month... I don't know how you survived without going mad."

Sandry looked down. "I did go a bit mad, I think. But at least I could move."

"That's true," Daja admitted. "Being stuck like that was the worst part."

They were both quiet for a bit, letting the courtyard fill with birdsong and the nearby tinkle of a temple fountain.

“How did Master Nico find you?” Sandry asked.

Daja shrugged. “Same as he found you and Briar, I guess. He had a vision that told him about where I was going to be, then he sensed me in the wreckage. They told me it took him two hours to bring me out of my trance.”

“Do you think you could do it again?” Her friend sounded fascinated. “Slow yourself down like that?”

Daja shook her head, in confusion rather than denial. “I don't know,” she admitted. “Now that I know how hard it is- maybe not. But with our Circle- maybe it'd be easier.”

Sandry slipped a small hand inside her robe to touch the thread circle, where it lay bundled up in a pocket. Daja felt it when the tip of Sandry's index finger met the stained-red section of the circle. A little shiver in the Force that made her sigh.

“Do you have nightmares about it?” Sandry asked.

“Yes,” Daja said. “But only at night.”

Sandry looked away.

“I know now,” Daja explained. “Why the dark didn't bother me. I could feel the ship around me. I felt every part of it in the Force. Your storeroom was-”

“Right,” Sandry interrupted quickly.

Daja put a hand on her arm, and thought, we're both too young for any of this.

“You heard music.”

Sandry's eyes met hers again. There was something dark and indecipherable in her saati's eyes. She repeated, “You said you heard music.”

Daja didn't speak, just nodded, slowly.

Sandry nodded back, the answer having satisfied her. Daja bit her lip until she tasted blood.

 

* * *

 

 

6.

  
Daja's heart pounded. She could shed the tan robes, grow her braids out again. She could be a mimander. They wouldn't let her make things, but she could protect ships, help the elders scry the future. She could carry a proper vibrostaff again. Live with real people, not kaqs.

Her fantasies were reigned back, sudden and sharp. A voice inside her said, No.

Her siblings. Lark and Rosethorn. Frostpine. The lab. The joy of creating useful, beautiful things.

When she turned, the others were all staring at her. 

"If I leave," she said, "I can't come back, can I."

Sandry shook her head in denial. Briar looked away. It was Tris who spoke. "Not to the Order," she said, calmly. "But to us?" She gave Daja a small smile. "Always."

Daja thought about what that meant. Attachment. Nico had told them to avoid it, but it had happened anyway. Sandry's circle was proof enough of that. Daja thought about valley fields on fire. She thought about Tris, screaming at them, sparks flying from her fingers. She thought about Briar, about the angry cloud that was his presence in the Force. She thought about Sandry, staring down Nico like she was twelve feet tall instead of four and a half. 

I can't leave them, she realized.

Not ever.

 

* * *

 

 

7.

 

Every Jedi built her own lightsaber. But Daja was the only one who carved hers. She used a small precision laser. The crystal was Polyam's final gift. It was awkward work, with a robotic hand that still didn't quite obey her orders just right. That, she decided, would have to be her next project; she knew she could make a hand that responded better, that worked with her instead of against her.

She wasn't quite sure why she made it double-sided. It just felt right.

 

* * *

 

 

8.

  
Frostpine might have reached out and stopped her dead with one muscular arm. He let her pace.

“I'm so angry,” she cried. “Why didn't the Force tell me? I live my life for the Force. I give so much to it, and what is even the point if it doesn't help me when I need it-”

"We're Jedi," Frostpine said. "Not gods."

He was right, of course, he was almost always right, but that didn't take the acrid taste from her mouth, didn't take the smell of smoke from her nostrils. "He killed so many," she said, and wiped tears from her stinging eyes. "I helped him. The Force helped him." Her throat closed up before she could say the final unforgivable words: _so why serve it?_

Frostpine didn't reply.

She walked to the window, looking out over the snow-covered city, the planet's famous high mountains rising up in the distance. She wondered if this was what the Dark Jedi felt, at the very start of their fall. This coldness, like there was a wall of ice between them and the galaxy.

Daja had thought she was a good Jedi. She had been certain of her path. She hadn't even noticed the comfort of those convictions until they were gone.

 

* * *

 

9.

 

She kissed Rizu, and there was no Force and no Order and no Code, nothing but the sun igniting in her heart and her mind. 

 

* * *

 

 

10.

 

It was strange, waking up in Temple living quarters again, familiar and strange at once. The surfaces and the color schemes in her apartment were all exactly the same as in Lark and Rosethorn's rooms, but lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling, Daja found it was impossible to ignore the differences. The space was quiet and still, which should have been good for meditation, but she found herself listening out for for the screams of Tris's bird, missing Briar's gentle snores, trying and failing to adjust to a darkness unbroken by the glimmer of Sandry's light crystal.

After a few minutes she gave up and swung herself off the bed. She walked to the window and pulled the blinds. Immediately the room filled with the ambient orange light pollution that was one of Coruscant's most reliable exports. Harsh city lights mixing with the softer glows of the Temple's lightstrips. It looked to be less than an hour before dawn. A good enough time to start the day, Daja thought. Someone had placed her clothing in neat piles by the door. She pulled on a light exercise shirt and loose leggings, then clipped her lightsaber to her belt and headed out into the corridor.

The dueling chambers were almost entirely empty. There were a few Jedi there practicing, early risers or chronic insomniacs, and they watched with undisguised curiosity as Daja began her stretches.

Nine years, she realized suddenly. Nearly nine years since the loss of Third Ship Kisubo.

 _I know,_ Sandry said in her head. _I've been thinking about it too._

Daja sat, extending one leg and bending over it, pushing her muscles as far as they would go. _Any news?_

_Not yet._

Daja turned to stretch the other leg. _Nine years,_ she said. _It can't all have been for nothing._

 _It wasn't,_ Sandry assured her. She sounded fierce and determined. Daja could sense the panic beneath the determination, but she could also tell that Sandry was doing a very good job at keeping that panic contained. _None of it was wasted._

_They should never have trained us._

_What else were they going to do with us? Besides, if they hadn't, we wouldn't have met._

Daja crossed her legs, toes tucked into the bends of her knees. She breathed, in and out, counted. When her heartbeat had settled, she reached for the Force. 

It was there, as always, a well of warmth and strength and light. Daja closed her eyes, and listened to the music.

 


End file.
